Month: December 2004

And what does a Fundamentalist get his son for Christmas? Here is Wesley with his new T-shirt and Taurus PT-132 semiauto:

We had a great day at the Barley household this fine Christmas. I was going to go to work, but The Voices said to stay home and clean the guns. So we’re doing our part to spread the message of the angels: “Peace through Superior Firepower.”

Yes, we Barleys live in a world where “gun control” means hitting your target. The Kingdom of God will be a time of universal peace. This isn’t it. In a fallen world such as ours, thugs need more than a smile and an assurance of unconditional positive regard. They need the fear that comes from knowing that their prey might be armed. And if they guess wrongly and attack us, we hope to assist the city of Memphis in its beautification program by eliminating a little of the trash at no charge to the taxpayers.

And should you dislike the idea of shooting an attacker dead, I suggest that, in the event that you happen to be attacked yourself, that you call out for a social worker to counsel the poor, disadvantaged punk who’s about to feed upon you. If that doesn’t work, maybe you should hope like heck that there’s a trained handgunner nearby.

In the final analysis, we are the richest and most free nation on earth because our military forces defeated those who would have enslaved us. People in hellholes across the third world work hard and live carefully, but they still don’t enjoy blessings such as ours. Other people, such as their government or bandits, make it impossible for them to flourish and grow rich.

We are a free people only because other people, evil people, cannot overpower us and steal what we have produced. Such people are out there. Make no mistake, they’re there. The newspaper is filled with stories of such people. The primary restraint against them is firepower.

I have my health and my family. There are a number of millionaires who’d gladly trade places with me, because I’m richer than they. But I can continue to be rich only if evil men are restrained by the fear of deadly force. God bless our military, and God bless all the responsible gun owners who stand ready to defend themselves and their families this Christmastide.

A big ol’ storm has paralyzed the midwest, and Memphis isn’t doing so well, either. When I crawled under a house yesterday morning, everything was fine. When I emerged some hours later, the city was covered with sleet, with more coming down all the time. By the time I set out for home (a fifteen-minute drive under ordinary conditions), it was dark and just at the time when rush hour is worst. It took an hour and a half to get home. Nobody was driving over 20 mph, and most of the time, when we were moving at all, we were going about 5 mph. All of the streets were packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, as the Interstates were impassible.

Thus it is in the South. We don’t know how to drive in ice and snow, and it just doesn’t pay to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars preparing for a storm that might occur once every three or four years. We have no snowplows, very little salt and sand, and apparently a governmental workforce that isn’t too enthusiastic about getting overtime hours.

Today the roads were iced over. You could drive 40 mph, but you couldn’t stop! So folks were still creeping along like a snail on his way to see his mother-in-law. Combine that with a backlog of plumbing jobs I had to get to and you can imagine why I see little attraction in the song “It’s the *most* wonderful tiiime of the year.”

Ah, remember the halcyon days of working for a plumbing company. I put in for my vacation months in advance; I broke it up so that the days would adjoin my regular days off. I’d put another log on the fire, put my feet up, and let the Company fend for themselves. Christmas was a great time.

Now I can no longer tell the Company to go jump in the lake. I am the company. So I fight the single-digit weather and the icy streets, solving one problem after another, because folks rely on me and turning them down would be the equivalent of throwing them to the wolves.

But it’s still too doggone cold.

Here’s a great video that everyone should view.

These are the words to “Homeward Bound,” the song playing in the background:

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red.
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming, when the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning, I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you’re missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return,
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning, and in the road I’ll stop and turn.
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end,
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing, I’ll be homeward bound again.

-Music and Lyrics by Marta Keen

Rhodesia, once the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa, has become Zimbabwe, an economic and political basket case. I just learned from a contact in South Africa that Air Zimbabwe is going bankrupt and will soon close. They can’t get enough passengers. It seems that Zimbabweans are now so thin, they can be faxed to their destinations.

Joe Blundo, of the Columbus Dispatch, wrote a fine column on Nov. 24. Unfortunately it is not available on the newspaper’s web site, so I’m reproducing it here. If they sue me, I’ll take it down.

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The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The re-election of President Bush is prompting the exodus among left leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and agree with Bill O’Reilly. Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal rights activists, and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted, and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left. Didn’t even get a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields. “Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through, and Rush annoyed the cows so much they wouldn’t give milk.”

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons, drive them across the border, and leave them to fend for themselves. “A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a drop of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though.”

When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about the Bush administration establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR.

In the days since the election, liberals have turned to sometimes ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have taken to posing as senior citizens on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizen passengers. “If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we get suspicious about their age,” an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies.

“I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history majors does one country need?”

In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and Canada, Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Canadian ambassador and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure liberals, a source close to Cheney said. “We’re going to have some Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. And we might put some endangered species on postage stamps. The president is determined to reach out.”

The International Chicken Sequencing Consortium reported today that they have sequenced and analyzed the genome of the chicken. If you don’t believe it, this cartoon, which is self-explanatory, will prove it:

This feat is supposed to help scientists in their study of human genetics, since 2.5% of the chicken’s genetics overlap with ours. But you already knew that we were like chickens. For instance, they have feet, so do we. They have a head, eyes, mouth, beating heart, etc., and so do we.

And why are we so much like chickens? According to International Chicken Sequencing Consortium, it’s because those genetic elements were preserved for 350 million years while we and the chickens were evolving from our common ancestor.

The family resemblance is unmistakable:

Col. Sanders, the cannibal, never realized this. He probably thought that God created the heaven and the earth and put the chickens here for us to fry. But, thanks to Darwin and the International Chicken Sequencing Consortium, we know better. The old view, that we’re supposed to eat fried chicken, is now called “speciesism.” It’s now considered wrong (by some of the more consistent thinkers within the leftist intellectual movement) to think that your species is better than another, or that you have a right to eat the other species.

Behold, Mr. Potato Head really is my brother!